The New Urban Frontier by Joshua Boehlke

: r e i t n o r F ban

r U w e N e Th

Reconceptualizing Depopulated Urban Zones Joshua Boehlke- RPI 2010 Thesis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to thank Michael Oatman, Demetrios Comodromos and Thomas Michal for their guidance and teaching throughout my thesis research and project. Their input has been knowledgeable and pushed me to work harder into developing a great thesis and project. I would also like to thank Jenna Clark. She has helped me stay positive and be selfcritical along the way. She pushed me to take chances and her knowledge of phragmites was very insightful. Finally I would like to thank my parents who have been there for me throughout this entire project. They gave me to courage to take criticism and react to it. Talking to them helped me take steps in getting work done. Thank you mom for joining me on my site visit to Buffalo, NY.

The New Urban Frontier

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lanscape is the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and the material from which it is constructed.â&#x20AC;? - Charles Waldheim

PRECIS/THESIS [PAGE 6] CRITIQUE [PAGE 8] --- SPRAWL [PAGE 9] --- ABANDON [PAGE 13] --- LINKAGE [PAGE 17]

GENEOLOGY [PAGE 18] --- GERMAN INDUSTRIAL CITIES [PAGE 19] --- RUST BELT CITIES [PAGE 20] --- DESIGNERS & PROJECTS [PAGE 24]

METHODOLOGY [PAGE 38] --- LANDSCAPE URBANISM [PAGE 39] -- -- -- ---

ECOLOGICAL URBANISM [PAGE WAITING SPACES [PAGE COLLECTIVE SPACE [PAGE TEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE [PAGE

44] 48] 52] 54]

DESIGN INVESTIGATIONS [PAGE 58] --- CRITERIA [PAGE 59] --- BUFFALO EAST SIDE [PAGE 62] --- PHRAGMITES INFORMANCE [PAGE 66]

SITE- DETROIT, MI [PAGE 78] --- JEFFERSON CHALMERS NEIGHBORHOOD [PAGE 82] PROGRAM [PAGE 88] --- URBAN FARMING [PAGE 90]

--- CULTURAL [PAGE 92] --- RECREATION [PAGE 94]

PROJECT [PAGE 96] --- LAMINATED SYSTEMS [PAGE 97] --- CHECKERED [PAGE 98] --- RECREATIONAL STRIPS [PAGE 104] --- CULTURAL EDGE [PAGE 108] --- HOUSING TYPOLOGIES [PAGE 114]

CONCLUSIONS

[PAGE 120]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[PAGE 124]

--- FIGURES & NOTES [PAGE 127]

CONTENTS 5

fig. 1: Tschumi Parc de la Villette Project

PRECIS/THESIS 6

From Newark to Philadelphia to Detroit, American inner city neighborhoods have suffered abandonment and depopulation as suburban sprawl has propagated urban flight. This sprawl and associated disintegration of urban cores is not sustainable and given the significant existing infrastructures in abandoned urban zones, reconceptualization of such areas to attract a return to the city is beneficial. Lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s activities are separated, people are traveling further between work and play and living with increased dependence on vehicles. In view of Rapid urbanization at the global level, American rust-belt cities have an opportunity to reengage their vacant spaces in lieu of re-urbanizing and shrinking their communities. This proposal, reengages remaining infrastructures with new architectural approaches to create vital, integrated social systems. Integrated planning and architectural approaches fuse together the programs of living, production, recreation and culture, to activate a collage of private and public interactions and continuities. The fusion of multiple systems thickens the normal block structure to create a fluctuation between urban interactions, territories and uses. Multiple systems transform to create a cooperative use of space through the integration of agriculture, architecture, and landscape, potentially rupturing the idea of community. Temporal spaces will link within existing programs and natural contexts, allowing fluctuation over time. By developing high degrees of exchange and interconnectivity with over-lapping networks and proximity to diverse adjacent neighborhoods. The vacant landscaped spaces within the city can be redeveloped to reinvigorate the voids of a particular neighborhood by creating spaces for various evolving uses in relation to the neighborhoods needs. Also by creating temporary program uses that change adjacent to current popular neighborhood destinations. This will ultimately relink the vacant neighborhood to restablish a sense of community, and create a seamless connection between neighborhood eges. The vacant urban holes need to go away with a reinvention of how residents from surrounding communities can immigrate and re-use the hole.

Reinvent the depopulated American city through an orchestration of multiple social, environmental, and circulatory systems to create a culturally, active overlapping of uses and zones between user and site.

fig. 2: Philadelphia, PA. Vacant area

fig. 3: Inner-city neighborhood

Rustbelt Cities

fig. 4: Suburban commercial area

fig. 5: Location of U.S. rust belt

CRITIQUE 8

The city is an interesting, complex architecture, which is composed of subcomponents functioning as a whole. “In the context of the rapidly transforming conditions of contemporary urban culture, the ‘weighty apparatus’ of traditional urban design proves costly, slow, and inflexible.” - Charles Waldheim (Reeser 1) Cities are patterns of relations, mostly ordered through orthogonal geometry (grid), which is capable of indefinite extension over time (fig. 2). The city is an ongoing self-regulating area, that adapts and evolves over changing times. The city grows and regenerates to utilize its needs and new technology, trying to balance out its use between machine and person. There are times when the person is no longer needed within a machined environment. This is where the self-regulating city becomes a vacant mess and there becomes less population within and new growth on its outskirts. The rhythmic city starts to have a boundary that fluctuates between indefinite and definite. There becomes no known end to its growth or parts, creating problematic areas of confusion. The city becomes too complex and not as functional as a machine. This complexity is through things like technology growth like wireless connections and cars. The person becomes disconnected with the outside world. (Marshall 1) The problems that arise especially in American cities is the humanless evolution of work environments which affects the inner city neighborhoods. Causes of these problems could come from the density and the declining use of certain programs within the city, like education, relaxation, work, and residence. These are the main programs that create the cities parts and organize a potential whole. When an area becomes more vacant, the physical spatial use starts to degrade, and people flee from that area. As the programs leave there is nothing for users and they start to leave, turning a central part of the city into a void, between an outer, individually programmed sprawl. (Kunstler 1, Daskalakis 1) Our environment around us is tolerated because we get satisfaction from imaginary worlds in technology like television and movies. Koolhaas’ junkspace, things like freeways, garages, and warehouses are more appreciated. “We should attempt to create an etiology of environmental stoicism and place machismo.” Relating to space, the difference between inside and out is complex. When you feel enclosed you could be inside or outside. (Benedikt 1) The neighborhood that becomes more and more vacant over time can have an impact on neighboring communities, essentially turning the whole city into a declining mess overtime. Many of the cities that have declining inner city neighborhoods, have declining populations. People start to move to surrounding cities or build new communities outside the city, creating the suburb environment. This is with the help of technology like

SPRAWL

The East Side neighborhood in Buffalo, NY has a plethora of vacancy within itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s buildings and zones. The area has an integration of newer residential structures trying to reuse what amenities the area has left (churches, commercial, schools).

The neighborhood has major roads that run through, yet have certain disconnections between existing residents due to open landscapes, boarded up structures and leftover unused infrastructures.

PHILADELPHIA VACANT SPACE

cars or box stores, the user, can travel further distances through networked highways that go around and over the vacant neighborhoods within the city. The sprawl and flight leaves emptiness and crime between surrounding communities and city center. (Kunstler 2) Today, vacancy problems mainly occur in the rust belt cities of north eastern United States. Cities that grew and sustained themselves on large manufacturing companies, and then became more mechanized, obsolet or outsourced to competing international markets. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, are being taken over by nature, due to the increasing building destruction and site vacancies. This loss of valuable city components lead to a loss of jobs, residents, and create a downslide of smaller businesses to collapse and patches of neighborhoods to grow in vacancy. (Cities of Dispersal 1) Based on data collected by the U.S. Postal Service and the Housing and Urban Development Department, shows the emptiest neighborhoods are clustered in places hit hard during the recession of the 1980s. The number of abandoned homes scattered throughout the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 65,000 neighborhoods concerns federal officials because of the potential to prevent the economy from recovering. Empty housing feeds upon itself. Experts say as more houses stand vacant, property values and tax revenues drop. The drop in property values lead to fewer buyers, which lead to more vacancies. Because of this vicious cycle in the north, people have been drawn to the temperate Sun Belt by more jobs and a lower cost of living. This cycle effects the residents who are unable to leave the abandoned neighborhoods due to a variety of situations. Majority of the Rust Belt cities have vacant neighborhoods that are more than 70 percent poor with unemployment often around 50 percent. About 2/3 of the homes are vacant or being used by squatters. The vacant communities still have potential, both spatially and architecturally with existing residents through religion, school and local architecture. In Buffalo, NY there are as many as 10,000 vacant, abandoned homes. Suburban sprawl, an aging population and manufacturing losses have left the city with a population under 300,000 -- about half what it was during the 1950s. In certain cities at their peak, the factories employed thousands. Now if there is only one building for manufacturing, the job market is no more. (Cities of Dispersal 2) The abandonment within the communities draw criminals to use the vacant buildings. Cities are trying to reverse the situations ,by buying sites to either rehabilitate or bulldoze the vacant buildings. All that this leaves is larger empty natural spaces between the current resident owned buildings, as seen in parts of Detroit. This action further separates the communities and furthers their decline and avoidance. This local government effort further declines existing commercial buildings and their values. Local businesses are being ruined by vast open disconnects between the community and the rest of the city. (Daskalakis 2)

ABANDON

Detroit, MI is a shrinking, post apacalyptic city, with disintegrating neighborhoods and leftover residents trying to cling on. Material left over and nature popping up between existing life, Detroit is starting to become a scattering of life and city, left between rural plots of land, declining population and too much seperation.

“Time and seasons play their part in programming the shifting performative urbanism of urban actors, providing space for both everyday preoccupations and spectacular events. Jim Corner, the theorist and leading practitioner of the Landscape Urbanist movement, sees urban actors opening up new public spaces for performative urbanism on ‘commons’ –shared space that can be freely inhabited by multiple actors for various events and programmes. These commons can often be formed in leftover spaces and those created by industrial shrinkage. Corner also computerised the layered analytical approach of Ian McHarg, his predecessor and teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, who adapted Patrick Geddes’ ecological reading of the city in its landscape, separating out each system in its own layer. Within this layered matrix, the shrinking and shifting of American cities appeared as clear patterns, opening opportunities for rhizomatic intervention in the interstices between the sequential assemblages” – Grahame Shane. Architectural Design Landscape Architecture Site/Non-Site Volume 77, Issue 2, pages 24 35, March/April 2007

fig. 6: Vacant industrial buildings

Buildings that have been vacant for long periods of a time, like a 20-year vacant factory, the building was not maintained over that time (fig. 6). This rehabilitation puts a higher price in turning the vacant building into a new program like luxury condominiums. It is usually cheaper for a government to just start over and create a new building to get new use and income of that lot more quickly. Many communities like Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, has tried to improve itself by making places to bring people out of the suburbs like new shops and condos. This effort doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t help the residents currently in the community, and even disconnects them further from the city. The current residents are usually poorer and need better living and places for their facility needs. This could then slowly over time become more prosperous building for the current residents, evolving into a multi incomed community. This could be done in a more phased development allowing for use of both poor and higher class people slowly coming together over the years, not just pushing one class out. (Cities of Dispersal 3, Waldheim 1) There are current trends being looked at in order to improve upon these communities. One is education, and helping making people more employable with in the area. Relocation assistance is being looked at by local governments to help buy out people who want to move from an unsellable home. Another is the urban footprint on the land needs to be reduced so that the excess housing and infrastructure can be eliminated to improve in other areas. This can be a problem, when trying to relocate people and businesses in a specific neighborhood that has a personal value on its residents. This method would be complicated in neighborhoods with ethnic backgrounds and certain buildings that residents grew up with. Relocation will also demolish buildings, wasting materials and valuable land. This will create a careful localized creation of density in certain areas and allow them to connect to other already vacated areas. In the end the use of vacant areas as nature preserves or agriculture becomes an idea for sustainability. (Cities of Dispersal 4, Waldheim 2) The complicated method of determining what neighborhoods will get help and what will be left vacant for non-urban activities, is linked closely to the boundaries between the two. The neighborhood has boundaries around itself and it links to the rest of the city through infrastructure and adjacencies. The neighborhoods in the city create a network of public space connected through multiple infrastructures, generally converging to an urban center. Peripheral locations from the center typically have a deficiency in public resources and development is extensive with no particular defined boundary. This undefined boundary, keep the area disconnected visually and physically, creating voids in scattered locations. (Daskalakis 3, Kunstler 3)

LINKAGE 17

fig. 7: Emscher Park, Germany

GENEOLOGY 18

Many of the rust belt cities in America have held competitions to solve the voids within their scattered neighborhoods. Before the American rust belt cities started to decline, countries like Germany was already redesigning their vacated manufacturing cities. The Eastern side of Germany has been putting out design concepts to help redevelop their shrinking cities. Things like IBA Urban Redevelopment came up with 4 Points of Action with things like reorganizing or de-urbanization. (William 1) The German Ruhr Valley (fig. 7) is a major area that is showing a major current trend of redevelopment, producing qualities that are being followed currently in the U.S. rustbelt. The valley has been turning old sites into cultural areas taking on the trends of recreation and nature. Creating sporting complexes and parks for locals to work and enjoy themselves. They are turning the interior of factories as museums and creating rock climbing walls out of old equipment. Around 260 projects in the valley were focused on ecological restoration, yet kept the conservation of industry throughout the spaces. The Emscher landscape park that was created, has introduced new ways of rethinking vacant industrial spaces, just like the High Line in New York City. The Ruhr Valley system of projects uses local and national artists to come from around Germany and turn old industrial structures, infrastructures and vacant land into artistic pieces. Majority of these pieces are interactive and created places for certain events like scuba diving in giant silos, or using bridges as tourist destinations. (Urban Space 1) The IBA (International Building Exhibition) developed projects and concepts that would be built in the German towns, showcasing by example and experimentation. With the new projects created, there have been more buildings torn down or redeveloped, then brand new structures being built. The designs were developed to reorganize and re-use the vacant land and vacant building in different orientations. The developments were based locally on the towns needs, but lead an influence in other towns which are facing the same shrinking problems. One of the IBAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s is to go against the compact city center, but leave clusters of houses that still are being used. Then turn the land around these clusters into countryside. This ultimately allows for the city to grow over time on the land bringing the area back to when places were smaller. Using a theme of â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Future is Lessâ&#x20AC;?, the majority of what is helping the towns is surrounding the left over residents with nature and not empty urban jungles. These methods potentially get rid of crime, since there is no place for hideouts or squatters. The IBA overall has established 19 different concepts in 19 different industrial cities all over Germany (Landscape Architecture 1) Places like Cleveland, Ohio are already taking the artist related and minimal concepts, and creating their own concepts

GERMANY

fig. 8: Pop-up City, Cleveland

fig. 9: Pop-up City temporary event

to reinvigorate the city. Artists and performers are turning “cool old industrial sites” into art installations and events that occur throughout the year. These vary from events for a specific group of people to using different types of spaces for artistic freedom. This type of use in the vacant spaces, can build new neighborhood relationships and connections over time. The rust belt cities are looked at opporutunities for artists turning the old into new uses. Another idea to come out of Cleveland is the Urban Design Collaborative’s Pop Up City (fig. 8). This is where they take specific sites in the city and create an event using what the site has and what types of people it wants to bring in to experience. Whether it be a bon fire and a band performance or a petting zoo/farm event, the events last only a couple of days and utilize the buildings and space around a site. This creates cultural events and keeps people coming back to the area to see what interesting things will be coming next. (Richardson 1, Urban Space 2) Having over 100 arts and cultures organizations, and one of the largest concentrations of artists in the U.S., Cleveland uses these as an advantage for solving their vacancy problems. The city of Cleveland is using itself as an urban laboratory and developed programs to help artists and locals afford housing. Communities educate themselves and explore the potential of having artists establish new character to their homes and openly invite everyone to help create new uses for areas. Through innovative series of programs, the communities could variably have multiple uses and bring new culture to themselves. This can be done, without constructing new structures, but reuse vacant buildings and lands. Through variable development and ever changing installations, areas could have the appearance of fairs, carnivals and Olympic parks, yet evolve and change based on popularity. These will eventually ignite new architectural forms. (Waterhouse 1, Daskalakis 4) The Pop Up City in Cleveland follows the “sportification” of German artist creations. Since Cleveland has similar vacancy problems and empty buildings like steel tanks dotting its landscape. One large warehouse has been converted into the worlds first indoor mountain bike park. With help from organizations like Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio, they make goals to implement at least one temporary project to ignite each neighborhood. This post-industrial off-the-grid planning creates potentials and newness in places that never experienced through traditional planning. The Pop Up City focuses on small areas within the city, slowly evolving each neighborhood through creating new uses and connections. Each neighborhood receives a different project, overtime determining what solves its problems best or show potential to. In Pennsylvania, both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, have held multiple design competitions to help solve the problems that occur in their inner city neighborhoods. Philadelphia

RUST BELT

fig. 10: Student Design, Pittsburgh

fig. 11: Urban Voids entry, Philadelphia

has set up a Neighborhood Recovery Tour, in which they are highlighting 27 neighborhood reinvestment ventures through the city of Philadelphia. Each venture uses a collaboration between municipal governments and the community, to produce something that is beneficial for the neighborhood. The goals of the these city wide improvements is to utilize both public and private efforts, as well as encourage citizens to give input in community future. (Cities of Dispersal 5) Philadelphia, being impacted by large amounts of vacancy outside the city center, has looked towards the City Parks Association for help. In 2005, they launched URBAN VOIDS: grounds for change, a competition open to all designers around the world (fig. 11). It was created to generate new ideas in solving or improving upon the extensive amounts of vacant places throughout the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 6th largest city. The city currently has 30,000 vacant plots, equal to around the same size as the city center itself. Majority of the ideas were to respond to the cities ecological infrastructure. This would come from using the ecology of the site as a force to shape a new urbanism. The project entries range from things like placing in urban farms, which can use the land and create jobs and product for local residents and businesses. Other submissions look at new industries like biotechnology, to use the vacant areas as landscapes for new sciences and manufacturing. This would create places like greenhouses, living surfaces, blurring the boundaries between industry and habitation. (Waldheim 2) Pittsburgh, on the other side of Pennsylvania, addresses its own post-industrial challenges by understanding and intervening in the built environment at multiple scales. Universities like Penn State, are having their landscape design students turn vacant lots into designed solutions for the city (fig. 12). Things like stormwater runoff and underused existing green spaces are taken into account for their designs. The students pick sites around the city and work closely with community groups to help frame the neighborhood needs. The intent is to give communities alternative ways at solving their problems and make connections at what might improve the city as a whole. (Cities of Dispersal 6) There have been many projects currently designed in cities that show examples of fixing inner-city vacancy and shrinkage. Both in the U.S. and the rest of the world, cities are being affected economically by post-industrial problems, and the resultant slow take over of nature. As manufacturing fig. 12: Student Design, Pittsburgh changes, into more technical and scientific improvements, people are losing jobs to machines and places are using other countries to manufacture goods more cheaply. So America, industrial areas are no longer being used and uneducated or poorer residents are left in areas that are being taken over by crime and wild nature. (Daskalakis 5)

RUST BELT

fig. 13: Stan Allen design projects

fig. 14: The High Line, New York City

The High Line Project in New York City designed by James Corner of Field Operations, is an example of reinvigorating a post-industrial site. This successful spot has become a tourist park, utilizing the wildness of the plants taking over the unused elevated train track that cuts through 22 blocks of western Manhattan. This design for leisure and plant interactions, takes the unused structure and makes it into something that is cultural and new connecting the communities it goes through. The design has led to more education in the realm of turning old industrial infrastructure into new uses, and has created community groups around it. These groups in turn help organize events and bring new programs to the locals. (Waldheim 3) Field Operations is a design firm that has created many new projects around sites similar to the High Line (fig. 14). It is principaled by James Corner. Their projects are focused around turning unused infrastructures that disconnect neighborhoods and turn them into public spaces playing with the idea of creating new connections. An example of this would be their Hudson Yards master plan design in New York City. Field Operations work to make people reconnect with nature and interact with it for work or pleasure, without having to destroy the built world, but evolve it. They design to tie both nature and the urban into one public space further evolving how vacant areas can have more potential and reinvigorate the neighborhood. “Their design for the Fresh Kills Landfill competition demonstrated the flexibility and power of a layered, performative systems approach (with its multiple feedback loops)”. This can be done in a minimal manner taking advantage of the local wild nature already taking over and strategically tying it into new materials and already existing infrastructures. “Corner argues that only through a synthetic and imaginative re-ordering of categories in the built environment might we escape our present predicament in the cul-de-sac of post-industrial modernity.” (Waldheim 4, Landscape Architecture 2) Stan Allen is another designer who questions what is the contemporary city (fig. 16) and how could new organizational designs come from the current urban culture. His projects play with the notion of landscape and urbanism, investigating what potential the site already brings to the community and then add more organization to the project. One of the projects from Stan Allen Architects, is their entry for the Downsview Park competition in Toronto. This project stands out, because of the way they integrated a flexible framework fig. 15: The High Line construction that integrated circulation and recreation with the landscape. The interesting thing is the flexibility of the system created, that with its precise construction and framework, creates an openended future of many uses. (CASE 2, Reeser 2)

DESIGNERS 25

ecology

ecological reserve

water regeneration

infrastructure

primary road network

secondary roads

program

ownership

anchor buildings

road path networks reforestation initial build-out

public transit pocket parks

public park amenities

final build-out

fig. 16: Taichung Gateway Park Layers

fig. 17: Taichung Gateway Park Site

This vast empty site offers an unprecedented opportunity to imagine a new urban paradigm that incorporates ecology, urbanism and architecture. The new image for the site is an immense green tract, an active site that distributes people, goods, bio-matter and energy throughout the site. It not only functions as the scaffolding for future development, but the figural void of the park creates a strong and progressive image for the future of the city. The new parkway infrastructure defines a zone of intense design investment while strategically opening up edges of the site to existing urban development pressures.

TAICHUNG GATEWAY PARK -STAN ALLEN 27

fig. 18: Southeast Coastal Park

Major Flows through Site

width of paths vary towards landscape edge.

Steps/Landscaping & Paths

broken edges between natural and synthetic

SOUTHEAST COASTAL PARK- FOA 28

“Urban activities are unstable, uncertain, they overlap and mutate.” By juxtaposing and superimposing different layers of the composition, programs exchange and extend creating a horizontal congestion. Koolhaas’ design for the park was one of experimentation in condensed social atmospheres. It is a constant challenge for architects to design flexible spaces that allow the delirious way of life we live in the cities. It is not sufficient to just provide open spaces. Through Parc de La Villette, Koolhass shows us an alternative on how to tackle this problem. By shuffling and compressing program and void Koolhaas invites the public to design its own activities. Unfortunately Koolhaas proposal never materialized. One has to wonder, would Koolhaas’ Parc de La Villette be able to successfully generate congestion and hence stimulate intense social interaction? (OMA 1)

fig. 19: Parc de la Villette diagram

PARC DE LA VILLETTE - OMA 29

buildings grow along major paths, clustering in a group. PROGRAMMING ON THE SITE

network of paths weaving and connection the network of trees. MAJOR CIRCULATION PATHS

fig. 20: Toronto Downsview Park

“Trees rather than buildings will serve as the catalyst of urbanization. Vegetal clusters rather than new building complexes will provide the site’s identity. An urban domain constituted by landscape elements, Tree City attempts to do more by building less, producing density with natural permeability, property development with perennial enrichment.” “The outcome is a matrix of circular tree clusters covering 25% of the site which is supplemented by meadows, playing fields and gardens.” (CASE 3)

TORONTO DOWNSVIEW PARK- OMA 31

INDIVIDUAL PROGRAMS LINKED THROUGH PATHS

MAJOR FLOWS THROUGH SITES

GROUPS OF MULTIPLE SPACES

fig. 21: Projecting Detroit Project

“The project takes inspiration in the vacated, decayed regions of Detroit, as these offer both potential and freedom. Reminiscent of Derridean undecidablity, that Truth is not found in structural oppositions but in the space between, they note that people are drawn to the gaps between present and absent, construction and erasure.” “Their project picks out uncanny spaces and offers possibilities for inhabitation that avoid ‘aggressive transformation.’ Formally, the project cuts a section of ground, adding various horizontal planes that shift the ground plane, decreasing synoptic perception so that landscape, city and horizon shift in and out of view.” (Daskalakis 6)

PROJECTING DETROIT - DASKALAKIS PEREZ 33

EXISTING BUILDINGS - GREEN PLATFORMS

POINTS OF PROGRAM - FLOW OF STRUCTURE THROUGH THE SITE

fig. 22: Shrooms project in NYC

“Looking at the empty lots not as blight but as a community resource, Sorkin hoped that a growing garland of Shrooms might help in both greening and rebuilding the neighborhood.” “As an urban proposition, Shrooms seeks to esta-blish a new pattern of movement through the neighborhood. These public greenways lead to the green rooms at the core of each structure, form blossoms that act as distributors for the loft spaces that surround them.” (Sorkin 1)

SHROOMS EAST NEW YORK - MICHAEL SORKIN 35

CIRCULATION PATHS WIDEN THROUGH DENSITY

LANDSCAPING AROUND PATHS AND PROGRAMMING 36

fig. 23: Michael Sorkin Project in NYC

“The neighborhood is the center, the location of the conveniences and necessities of daily life within an easy walk from home. The neighborhood is a maximization of economic, social, cultural, and environmental self-sufficiency.” - Michael Sorkin

fig. 24: Michael Sorkin Project in NYC

The urban experience is the coalescence of scale, density, dimension, and activity through comprehensive and malleable space. Cities aren’t a Disneyfied juxtaposition of predigested urbanisms taken from their original contexts and meanings. The formal repertoire for city making doesn’t need to take forms from a past inventory like the collage city theory. What is taken from the past is the experiences and sensations transforming them through a connection to an existing area. (Sorkin 2)

NEW YORK CITY PROJECTS - MICHAEL SORKIN 37

METHODOLOGY 38

The current theories that are coming out of contemporary cities are what ultimately define the designs that are created by designers like Stan Allen and James Corner. Many cities are shrinking around the world and trying to evolve around plots of scattered vacancies, caused by evolving industries. One major theory that is trying to utilize the open landscapes and keep communities connected is Landscape Urbanism. When infrastructure was created to utilize manufacturing years ago, it has ceased use coinciding with the cease of manufacturing in cities. So cities are full of unused train tracks, stations, and land. These areas are becoming more natural due to lack of human use and are becoming a medium for a new design scheme. Landscape urbanism is using the infrastructure and landscape around it in new ways to keep it connected to the areas of the city that are still in use. “Landscape is the foundation that frames the way we build”- James Corner. What led to landscape urbanism was the belief that current landscape architecture trends just cover up engineered environments. There needed to be a new layer of design that actually integrated the landscape and engineering into one space. This layer would then integrate the one space into unused areas as well as still person occupied areas. (Waldheim 5, Reeser 3) Landscape urbanism came from the original ideas from Olmstead and how his park designs for New York and Boston were integrated with the surrounding streets and thoroughfares across them. As rust belt cities become more vacant, there becomes an evolving mixture between built city and natural invaded areas. These vacant landscapes and structures, become the new building blocks for city and neighborhood creation. The cities landscape is becoming “a creature of a low order, feeding on many individual and rational decisions, to become a space dominated irrational whole.” The difference between one programmed space and another is blurring, which can utilize itself for creating a connected city. Landscape urbanism creates concepts for connecting different objects. The exploration of connecting varied complex areas within the city periphery. This theory focuses on designing on ideas not on materials. A design takes ideas from the history of a place, its ecology and the intended use for the site. The designers look at visual to physical connections using natural patterns across the urban landscape. (Reeser 4) The definition of landscape urbanism strives to make everything relate around a specific area of interchange. It uses ecology, infrastructure and landscape design and incorporates fig. 25: Central Park, New York City it into urbanized principles. Landscapes that are rising in size through out post-industrial cities are the driving forces behind the new city structure. Staying away from the cliché of land-

LANDSCAPE URBANISM 39

fig. 26: Olmstead Emerald Necklace

fig. 27: Nolli map

scape architecture just being open spaces that are not dense, the designer is more about challenging the ideas about people and nature being opposites. As American cities are no longer using certain areas and infrastructures, they are left to nature to take over. These areas are then scattered throughout places that still have urban characteristics and uses. So the challenge of the landscape urbanist is to design this natural intersection into a use for the surrounding residents. So taking into the philosophy of the Nolli Map created for the Itallian piazza (fig. 27), the notion of only two distinct separations is challenged by the post-industrial city. The white that designates space around buildings varies so greatly that isn’t it important to delve deeper into what exactly creates the built forms organizations. What is really going on? Isn’t the white and black more connected and blended than the map visually perceives? The white becomes more important into what keeps the black (built environment) together in groups, neighborhoods, etc. (Landscape Architecture 3) Some design philosophies that are strongly used in landscape design is are the notions of interior and exterior thresholds. Designs look at what components can connect the built architecture to landscape. In this sense it would be infrastructure or vacant buildings around still occupied areas. The importance of the design comes around the threshold, or areas where transformations begin and there is a dynamic relationship starting to happen. The threshold design, will function at more than one scale, connecting different spheres or areas. What can be taken from new urban design is what things are inserted in the landscape or open space between what’s already built. The potential that comes from insertion is great, and leads to initiating cycles of activity between what is new and the existing urban context. When using already open areas that are random, the level of insertion needs to be explored to determine what is best. What engages the space with its surroundings creating a certain amount of blending and breaking of the urban continuum? Since buildings have over time lost a need for a use, just about every design is temporary and was inserted to its surroundings. There becomes a level of relation with the surroundings that becomes explored to help reconnect. If the typical designs and programs don’t work, then what transformative and noticeable things will grab new users and bring in more use. The new insertion within the space can open never before noticed urban layers and reveal fig. 28: Peter Latz, lanscape park more options for residents with limited resources. (Waldheim 6, Reeser 5) The endless possibilities of exchange that new insertions within an area can create, become new change for an

LANDSCAPE URBANISM 41

fig. 29: Governorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Island design (Summer Park)

fig. 30: Igualada Cemetary project, 1991

urban atmosphere. This change is developed through working with the areas past and present. What does the site bring to the design and improve on what is there. (Landscape Architecture 4) Infrastructure, the unused built environment around a site is what designers use towards creating new uses for local residents. (fig. 29) When elements are combined, different kinds of space and activities can be explored. This reuse allows for improvement on the community and its economic value, which brings in more people to use it. Advantages from using what is there is the familiarity of site and value from not costing much. Even more important is the use of infrastructure, which most likely was placed in a very strategic manner on the site, that it has great potential for design. It is capable of creating conditions for future events. Infrastructure in cities, especially existing, are placed mostly linearly through and cut between buildings and create corridors that blend back and forth. So designers feel unused infrastructures like train tracks and roads, create separations that negatively affect the area. So with landscape urbanism, they start by look for vacant infrastructures and take advantage of them as a natural connector, while using the already grown nature for public spaces and parks. (Richardson 1, Waldheim 7) The connector is what benefits the landscape urbanist project. Creating connections in places that normally donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t appear compatible, turn the design into a strategic stitch and grafts the surrounding places together. Infrastructure is designed through characteristics taken from nature and disrupts the oppositions between sides, while playing with levels of vacancy. Through exploration of connections, the segregation of activity starts to vary through users and based on how intense the connection is. The density of the area is explored in designs, organizing familiar geometries between nature, culture and program. The infrastructure the landscape urbanist uses is usually based through a systematic layout in which the structure was creates. The benefits from this layout, allows for the design to stay familiar with the locals, yet explore a new use for it while connecting new areas. (Richardson 2, Urban Space 3)

LANDSCAPE URBANISM 43

fig. 31: Urban farming for Detroit, Mich.

ECOLOGICAL URBANISM 44

Today’s cities are growing out to handle more residents and create more amenities. As cities sprawl across the land, creating suburbs, neighborhoods, there becomes too many to handle and things start to become separated. In most cities there becomes so many parts that they aren’t put together with respect to the whole. As areas become more separate or used less, the role of “nature” starts to pull through in the area. Nature in the city has been used throughout time, with people like Olmstead or the ideas of the Garden City. Nature gives neighborhoods places for recreation and shows materials that are not concrete or metal. Designers try to use “nature” elements to transform circulation systems towards new spatial connections. The juxtaposition of “natural systems” and manmade systems explores new materiality and new connections, both visual and physical. The benefits of connecting neighborhoods that are different through “natural” and “artificial” regrowth, could improve both sides. Through connecting and exploring new connections, vacant places could become to grow again. (Lee 1, Howard 1) The city of Detroit (fig. 31), a rust belt city, has looked into what designers could do in the areas where nature was taking back the land. Trees are growing through empty houses and grass is carpeting empty car factories, creating homes for local wildlife. Taking this empty, new age landscape, designers are looking into farming in vacant areas between neighborhoods that are still surviving. This is beneficial for the local economy, bringing more jobs and giving the farms products to local business. With the recession, urban agriculture has become a means to bring food to urban families, and there is an ease of already having open land in inner city areas. (Reeser 6, Territory 1) Looking into urban farming, there is a variety of designs to create large gardens or small farms to take up the small acreage areas that scatter throughout the neighborhoods. This uses the land that separates people who still live in the area and what amenities they have left. The urban farm becomes a connector piece bringing value, and new use. In Detroit, hundreds of backyard gardens and many community gardens, help feed students in many of their schools, as well as many families. Each section will grow a different crop or use, depending on soil condition and building remnants on a site by site basis. This type of design is beneficial when already ¾ of the residents get their groceries from local convenience stores and gas stations. (Reeser 7, Landscape Architecture 4) fig. 32: Unused infrastructure As Mohsen Mostafvi author of Ecological Urbanism puts it, We need to consider the large scale in a different way, especially in the urban areas. “The urban, as the site of complex

ECOLOGICAL URBANISM 45

fig. 33: Nature growing in vacant Detroit

fig. 34: Urban prairie

relations (economic, political, social, and cultural), requires an equally complex range of perspectives and responses that can address both current conditions and future possibilities.” Use layering of systems to create new complex connections between each creating a systematic ecologic for the surrounding area. “How can the city with all its consumption, be ecological?” The new city organization needs to accommodate the conflictual conditions between ecology and urbanism. (Mostafavi 1) The organization of systems, benefit and create ways for the individual to open up in a group and bring their responsibilities to group actions. Cities today are no longer used for full time residents. They are culturally consumed by tourist and are catered to them through aesthetics and picturesque views. The city still remains in a state of dispersal and alienated. The city cant go back to the traditional, or jump into an agglomerate of randomness. Current projects like the Promenade Plantee in Paris, produce different city experiences through stark juxtapositions and projections of varying conditions. New cities need a new relational approach between terrain, the built, and the viewers participatory experiences. The Parc de la Villette project by OMA was their method of combining programmatic instability with architectural specificity. It’s a horizontal spread of multiple programs connected through the landscape. The project proposes an interaction of gathered uses. “We must be aware of the dynamic relationships, both visible an invisible, that exist among the various domains of a larger terrain of urban as well as rural ecologies.” Andrea Branzi, approaches the city as one that is not reliant on a compositional or typological approach. The city has a fluidity that can diffuse parts over time. The city has a capacity to be reversible, evolving and provisory. Which is necessary in response to the changing needs of a society in a state of constant re-organization. The city could become productive groups of residences, workplaces, and leisure spaces intertwined together. (OMA 2, Mostafavi 2) We need to look at the opportunities brought from cities in terms of location, functions, and daily maintenance operations. Places like Havana, are creating urban allotments to cultivate on large scales. The allotment gardens in Liverpool show an example of the potential for social interaction and healing. Ecological urbanism has to have flexible rules with some principles that can be adapted to particular locations with specific conditions. fig. 35: High Line before new park “The intention behind engaging new subjectivities and collectives through the frameworks of ecological urbanism is to engender greater opportunities for social and spatial democracy.” (Mostafavi 3)

ECOLOGICAL URBANISM 47

fig. 36: Four typical waiting spaces

WAITING SPACES 48

The disconnection that is created in vacant communities where unused buildings are torn down, the blank sites that are left have a use for current designers. The term waiting spaces is being thrown around to describe spaces that are in transition awaiting new development. “The phenomenon of city sprawling characterised the second half of the 20th century and became so widespread and powerful that it has shifted the way cities were traditionally organised, from wellcontained urbanities to the dispersed territories we live in today.” (Kunstler 3, Cities of Dispersal 7) With cities expanding past their surrounding territories, their interiors regenerate in a continuous cycle of building and reusing urban terrain. In Europe there are different types of sprawling cities, that are produced by different economic, social and political conditions. Waiting spaces come in four types and occur based mainly on their surrounding characteristics. Waiting space range from a disused building like a bus depot, to a awkwardly sized plot of landscape between a residential or commercial area (fig. 36). The sites can have never been developed on, yet have a lot of development all around, or could be in transition from a vacant area with buildings that are still in use all around. The notion of the waiting space is looked into especially in European countries due to the trend of current cities transitioning from their centers to their peripheries. (Cities of Dispersal 8) The waiting space is usually designed on a location to location basis, taking into account the space availability and location within the city. If a space will eventually be used over time, it could still utilize a temporary structure during the time it is unused. As a space is found further away from the city center it usually becomes larger and less dense, being more open to different programs. Current waiting space designs, situate each space with a city info-point or a modular unit defining the entrance to the site. The spaces are explored with awakened designs, like self-sustained infrastructures. The waiting space is defined by its emptiness surrounded by evolving surroundings. “Waiting spaces can provide a temporal shelter for urban activities that are temporary or cannot take place inside the canonical productive system of contemporary cities.” (Cities of Dispersal 9) The waiting space theory is used to create an idea of an intermittent city. The intermittent city would be a networked series of waiting spaces at an urban scale, connecting through existing infrastructures. The intermittent city can change and switched through assembly and dismantling, allowing the spaces to change for more permanent means. Spaces will always be kept connected and public, through allowing a variety

WAITING SPACES 49

fig. 37: Uses of waiting spaces

of businesses and groups to bring their own uses to the spaces (fig. 37). Through variation, there can be many temporal ways of inhabiting and experiencing the city. The city would be up to date with having databases on the web and around the city, showing waiting spaces and what institutions are using which ones and when, creating a collective, cultural awareness for the neighborhoods. (Cities of Dispersal 10) Since waiting spaces will be designed around existing infrastructures, there becomes the creation of interacting between horizontal and vertical space. This can especially occur at places like highway interchanges. They link the neighborhoods in the cities periphery, yet keep a certain separation. There becomes an interaction between the landscaped spaces left between these interchanges and the artificial pattern they weave through out that landscape. The ecological and social benefits that weaving the left over space into the surrounding interchange further bring the neighborhoods together as a city whole. There becomes a more connected city through using the spaces throughout the infrastructure to explore its level of exposure to other users. An example would be to bring one type of user into another area through a new type of amenity or something interesting to use. The idea of creating temporarily on a waiting space produces a new, ready-made urban culture. (Cities of Dispersal 11)

fig. 38: Waiting space design using strips

WAITING SPACES 51

fig. 39: Public collective spaces

COLLECTIVE SPACES 52

“City means space for trade, culture and entertainment and therefore the best possibilities for social exchange.” The city in its whole and its smallest parts should aspire to providing the user the opportunity to inspect, assess, and bump into one another. The space in cities is social and creates a wide ranging amount of situations. Social life that occurs in the space between programs of a city is collective space. Courtyards have been used in communities all over the world, like Hakka dwelling-houses or the Duren housing complex in Germany. These structures utilize the private, yet connect the community through designing the residences around a communal space. As in the Duren housing complex, instead of surrounding all the houses by the typical street, why not surround the street with the houses, creating more visual and physical connections to each house. This creates a central collective space in which the locals can use as playgrounds, gardens and shared yards (fig. 39). (Cities of Dispersal 11, Hertzberger 1) The court pattern creates a collective space and takes the surrounding areas and inverts it. Take the typical interior of the block and bring it out and place the collective public space that surrounds and put it within the center of the residences. Collective spaces typically are found in the streets and squares of cities and placing buildings along the linear paths they create. The collective space in a city fights to truly be public, yet places are privatized by owners and building elements. “Whenever architects and planners through the ages have occupied themselves with space it has almost always concerned buildings for social life, in other words where a sense of the collective is expressed and where large numbers of people converge whether spontaneously or along organized lines.” The idea of collective spaces has evolved from just large structures to the littlest places in the city where people meet up by chance. (Hertzberger 2) Collective space is neither public nor private. Spaces such as streets, squares, cafes, lobbies, have a catalytic effect on social contact, allowing everyone to utilize their own movements and succeed in their own intentions. The feeling of interaction can be achieved through organized events, and the social contact created turns the collective space into social space. These spaces are what leads people to seek out what the city is and what brings it together as a whole. Collective space is public areas where users perform private activities, or private spaces used collectively. Modern places like service centers, fairs, parking lots, and malls are today’s collective spaces. (Cities of Dispersal 12, Hertzberger 3) Public transportation areas, like stations are the cities definitive collective space. These spaces should be designed to be stimulating and multiform through innovative urban weaving. Some transportation areas separate a neighborhood. Some areas lack certain amenities that force residents to commute across the city to access them, like a lack of a grocery store. The exploration of finding collective spaces and weaving them to create a new layout with a variety of programming, can bring new life to a specific neighborhood. It can also satisfy the needs of the residents and re-compacting the space to create more social life. Places like Belgium use a town’s original landscape to recombine segments of public space to itself on multiple scales. Using highly tangible interventions within the cities center, it allows the inhabitants to directly interact with natural conditions. The project hybridizes different types of landscaped interventions in spaces of varying size, trying to create spaces that provide feedback to inhabitants and other groups. (Hertzberger 4)

COLLECTIVE SPACES 53

“All architecture to some extent is temporary” - Renzo Piano

fig. 40: Hotelit, hotel/art space, 2001

fig. 41: Billboard house

TEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE 54

Temporary structures are great elements for creating templates in design. They allow for growth, connections, and usually start as low cost prototypes. They have value in helping create permanent structures, due to the invention of construction systems and growth potential while using valuable and local materials. Temporary structures are capable of doing what permanent structures can, only through their movement, they communicate through where they have been or where they are able to go. This ease of movement produces a low impact on the environment. The construction of temporary structures is expressive and reactive, while using locals to construct them. The main purpose of being temporary is function and continuity of the surrounding area. The uses for them vary from exploring new program interactions to being movable to communicate at multiple sites. These structures also allow for experimenting how a certain program like a farm can work in a specific crowded public site. They are beneficial for cheap growth and evolution, around the evolution of the site that surrounds the structure. (Transportable 1, Melis 1, Bonnemaison 1) Looking a typical city or site, there is a norm for what amenities belong there. Yet designers need to explore on what could grow new in areas that have become dull. The temporary structure is able to incorporate and connect one specific space with a new use. In 1982 Renzo Piano Building Workshop, created a traveling pavilion for IBM, which brought the computer from its normal environment and placed it right in the middle of nature. With the use of glass and systems that were mobile, people could use IBMs technology in the middle of a public park. There have been designs which combined hotel environments into public art exhibits, allowing only the user to control what and when the public could see into the room of art. Another design explored the idea of advertising around a residential structure along a circulation route, using the company who pays for the advertising to pay for the upkeep and construction of the structure. (Transportable 2) The mobility and transformation of temporary structures produces an architecture that is more connective and open to a variety of uses. The Mobile Linear City by Vito Acconci, used a barrel vault to go from one length and then pull out to make a longer structure that is elevated and able to be lived in. Markies are structures designed by Eduard Bohtling in the late 1980s, was a residential structure that opened up larger when in place on a site, then closed to be moved. It used the Dutch canvas shape to create two new rooms out of the main one. Another structure that employs the more mobility characteristic is the Mobile Porch designed in 2000. It is a small easily moved construction that can link to multiple others and they can

TEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE 55

fig. 42: Billboard housing module

fig. 43: Markies, 1995

fig. 44: Mobile Porch, 2000

expand to create a certain display within a space. They create the use of a wall, a floor and can be used to display goods for sale, or even be used to house a miniature art exhibit. Its flexibility allows it for moving through out a cities public area. Its openness transforms it into a continuation of spatial flow, between where it is located and what it is going to be used for. (Melis 2) The major influence of an architectural design is its site and need for the site or community in the first place. How would the design connect to the rest and allow for an accurate creation of what is needed? There are some temporary structures that only work in specific areas and there can be parts that are permanent that grow into temporary uses. An example would be a fairground or even Penns Landing in Philadelphia. The site is designed to hold a specific type of program, but can be used for a variety of similar events to that program. The site is permanent, but the use within it is temporary. This type of design can be classified as semi-permanent, like modular designs. Modular designs transform and connect to a more permanent whole. So parts of the whole change around the communities change, like no longer need for one module, or a further need of modules in another area. Modularity allows for breakdowns into areas that connect to the site. The construction systems can evolve around the programmatic need of the site or multiple sites through modularity. (Melis 3, Transportable 3) Structures that are lightweight and temporary have come from the design of huts and tents of nomadic people all over the world. The temporary uses of structures have been mainly for expeditions, or celebration and temporary festivals. Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world there is many elements to need a temporary structure. People are always moving and the distances between traveling vary from cars to walking downtown. Over the last couple of decades, the city and architecture has been designed around the automobile, creating roads, parking structures, and drive thrus. Temporary architecture in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s design world is mainly focused on functionality and not on movement. Designers want to create industrially created designs, that are practical and can function for a longer period of time than current architecture trends. This new trend is associated with todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cultures always evolving and wanting a variety of options, while moving through the day at fast paces. Since people are moving faster the needs for them change from area to area, so food carts and shopping structures can move from area to area. (Melis 4)

fig. 45: Modules of different sizes

TEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE 57

juxtaposing opposites

pattern organization

infrastructure

condensed vs. open

patch typologies program

movement

reflecting & revolving proximity

DESIGN INVESTIGATIONS 58

Looking at a variety of methods to connect existing spaces with new ones that can be temporary in size or even location. In order to reconnect and turn an area into a community, there needs to be multiple integrations of spaces and programs to bring a variety of urban users together. The intersections of space and circulation happens on multiple levels, creating new intersections as users move through a site, further creating multiple density potentials and urban scenarios.

CRITERIA 59

Taking existing patterns and organizations of the urban infrastructures, the evolution of the urban environment needs to positively grow off of them. Experiementing with the transformation of existing infrastructures through replication, rotation, pattern organizations. Taking what works and still exists and transforming it through growth horizontally or vertically, cutting across vacated areas, linking whats left over, potentially improving the community and spatial layout.

Vacant

Vacant Vacant Vacant Vacant

CRITERIA 61

DOWNTOWN BUFFALO

Vertical Farmers Market Horizontal Library Through an investigation of an existing American, vacant city, the popularity of a specific existing space was looked at as an ignitor for further architectural connections. Looking at Buffaloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s East side neighborhood, the current area is covered with a fabric of vacant buildings along its main commercial streets and vacant residences in between. These vacant structures have a growing number of unused spaces in between them. The East side is seperated by five different neighborhoods that used to thrive in industrial business and jobs. In the last twenty years the area has decreased in over half of its population.

EAST SIDE BUFFALO STUDY 62

EAST SIDE BUFFALO STUDY 63

Vertical Art Festival Horizontal School (festival, temporary space)

Multiple sites to have spaces for evolving program mixed with already (neighborhood assets)

static program that exists in the neighborhood. -while linking through pedestrian and bicycle transit 64

WORK WORK WORK AMENITIES EDUCATION

PUBLIC

AMENITIES PUBLIC PUBLIC

TRANSIT PARKS PARKS The East side is surrounded by thriving parks and other Buffalo neighborhoods that have increased work flow in technical businesses. The residents of East side, lack the educational skills to attain those jobs in the surrounding areas. The redesign in the East side needs to utilize what it has left and connect the current residents with the surrounding communities. This would bring in new jobs, new uses, new neighborhoods. The area has the Broadway Market, many Religious and cultural places that keep the existing context alive. These are beacons that new architecture can connect off of, creating new programs and zones for travelers and possible new residents. East Buffalo Good Neighbors Planning Alliance http://www.ci.buffalo.ny.us/Home/City_Departments/Office_of_Strategic_Planning/Good_Neighbors_Planning_Alliance

EAST SIDE BUFFALO STUDY 65

fig. 46: Phragmites plant

fig. 47: Phragmites reed-bed

PHRAGMITES INFORMANCE 66

WATER LINE

SOIL LINE

STEM GROWTH OVER TIME

Phragmites (fig. 46) is a common reed plant found in wetlands and is a very invasive species on that takes over other plant species along coasts impacting both ground and wetland systems along their edges. The way the plant grows allow for it to easily connect and spread out. The plantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; roots our rhizomatic which grow and intersect over time, creating new stems. The roots overlap and stop as they run into each other creating new groups of stem clusters vertically. The root is mainly horizontal and linearly growing into other plants roots and sprouting stems around other plants.

RUNNERS STOP AT INTERSECTIONS

ROOT GROWTH IN PLAN

PHRAGMITES INFORMANCE 67

MESHWORK

OVERLAP

Phragmites has multiple systems at multiple scales. Zooming in to the seed growth in muliple branches that are flexible and fluid in space. The stems of the plant grow closely to others creating dense cavities of space with meshing overlapping leaves that go perpendicularly to the verticality of the main stem. STRUCTURAL SUPPORT LESS

LESS DENSITY (MORE WIND FILTRATION)

MORE DENSITY (MORE SAFE HABITATS FOR BIRDS) STEM VERITCALITY

GROUP OF STEMS

On a larger scale the phragmites groups are found along the edge of the wetland and dryland (fig. 48). It can be seen how it forms and takes over the edge, creating a link or barrier between the two. The beds are used as a habitat for small animals on the ground and birds. On the water side the parts of the stems that submerged are used by fish and other aquatic animals, making the plant into a multi-used structure that connects two sides.

fig. 48: Reed-bed in London

NEW GROWTH

DEAD REEDS

REEDBED FARMLAND GROWTH FARMLAND MEDIUM GROWTH WATER

PHRAGMITES INFORMANCE 69

GROWTH ALONG THE EDGE

Taking the method of layering systems and separating all the smaller systems within the whole, we want to see how natural things operate in their own ecosystem. Each objectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ecosystem is tied to external forces, like other species or other structures, creating a larger ecosystem of connections. Through continuous investigation, the separate systems are formed through their use and reaction from other forces, creating rhizomatic links that change over time. Whether the analysis is of a natural system or a synthetic one, we are able to figure out how many things make it work and what hybridizing certain patterns could do in other scales and contexts. Looking at inner-city vacancy there are patterns that are contextual to the area, connecting natural regrowth to synthetic buildings that are left over. By looking at the sequence of how the neighborhood has been formed or what buildings/programs that are still being used, the exploration created a temporary fabric of fluctuating spaces through out allowing for multiple occupations of multiple amenities. As in projects like the Yokohama Terminal, the spaces would fluctuate based on location to other spaces and organization within the context. This fabric of temporary structures would connect to the existing context through exterior influences of current buildings and circulations still being used. So over time certain parts of the designed structure/s could become more permanent based on their connection to current structures and location on the site as well as popularity through growing programs. This exercise of interpreting object performances helps me understand how the site works and what systems are changing over time and what are more permanent. Through investigation it allows me to see what patterns can connect to the structures that I design and what scales. As I develop the concept, materials will help improve the spaces and overall system as a whole. By taking apart every aspect of the context, and seeing how it works through time and use, what goes into the site/s will be more connected and allow for something that works well and can grow based on use.

PHRAGMITES INFORMANCE 71

The current exercise is helping me develop my project of temporary used spaces that could evolve/ grow to become permanent over time on the site based on use and size of program. This random growth through popularity, could allow for different programs to intersect and create new spatial experiences or uses for the spaces designed. The hybrid of systems creates a method of tying the spaces into existing buildings and they grow vertically surrounding structures. Over time the spaces on the site will grow out horizontally slowly building off each space eventually growing vertically. As the growth occurs the spaces will become permanent to hold the growth of use. I can connect the starting rhizomatic roots to the site through the investigation of different layers already there. The research of the site becomes a more strategic method of analyzing the site, its programs, users, and material construction connecting the spaces to the landscape that is there. As the spaces grow the landscape will evolve through its own use and connection to the structures that are forming.

HORIZONTAL GROWTH OVER TIME

GROWTH ACROSS INFRASTRUCTURE 72

INCREMENTAL PROGRAM THAT IS EVENLY SPACED

PHRAGMITES INFORMANCE 73

verticality grows between existing

contour change against vertical tower

axial strips connecting exisitng

program strips interact with existing

open spaces have larger strips

collage of landscape and urban elements

verticality more dense in clusters

paths along landscape, with program between

“Function was understood in terms of its cultural and social role.” - Farshid Moussavi Form is based on what system it is developed around and it is not a subjective thing of beauty. The form is created around what connections the building will make to its environment. Then the use of material transforms the structure into a continuation of its context and produces an inbetween flow from culture to culture. People are subjective, yet form can be created through the context of the site and allow for potential growth and use through its close relations and adjacencies. Built forms aren’t universal, but allow for multiple systems to work throughout them. The systems work off of the old and evolve in the most beneficial way. “Differentiation through current trends”- The site is full of systems that still work and show where things don’t work. If the new form is integrated materially and physically to the forms that work, potential differentiation can occur. Forms need to contribute to an environment that would connect individuals to multiple choices. The forms enhance the choice selection in the affects they give to the users senses. These affects persuade the users into certain spaces. Forms are created through hybridizing systems to cater to different requirements which creates the reason why forms cant have a single meaning. (Moussavi 1) Transversal systems- “base unit” assembles a variety of causes and concerns into a complex supramaterial whole.” (Moussavi)

STUDY MODELS 75

axial interventions to create groups of space 76

stacking normally horizontal program

STUDY MODELS 77

fig. 49: Buildings along Jefferson Ave

SITE: DETROIT 78

SITE

DETROIT

fig. 50: Main road between Downtown and site

ROAD PATTERNS

ER DL AN H C

K PAR

K REE ER C L N CON USTRIA IND

WN TO

SIT

OIT

E ALM -CH D N O O S FER RHO JEF HBO G I E N

IN PO

K PAR

Y/ SIT EN S D R LAS HE HIG HER C HIG

SIT

L NA CA E K LA

fig. 51: Amenities around site

TER WA F O

M FRO

E TH

Detroit is one of the prime examples of a dwindling American city. It has lost nearly half its population in the last 50 years. Being a city that was mainly sustained on the American car manufacturing market, the society shifted as the production ceased. Many areas around Detroitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s downtown have been affected by the blight of joblessness and people leaving to surrounding towns. Unlike other rust belt cities, Detroit has had vacant areas for so long, that buildings are gone completely and nature is thriving in areas. Other cities have just vacated residences and buildings, where as in parts of Detroit, the buildings that are left are surrounded by acres of land, essentially creating rural atmospheres. These areas are usually surrounded by thriving communities, that take advantage of the car which become disconnecting. On the farthest south east side of downtown Detroit, about eight blocks north of Lake Michigan, the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood is one of these vacant areas.

Vast amounts of unused land

Vacant Industrial Buildings

More Dense Residentail Area

Main Historic Business Street

DETROIT 81

fig. 52: Unused roads going through site

JEFFERSON-CHALMERS 82

The Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood is one of the poorest communities in the city. It is also a very empty and desolate area with very little left from when Detroit thrived. The interesting thing is the neighborhood is surrounded by communities and areas that are positive to a city (fig. 51). Directly south of the site is the is East Jefferson Avenue, a road that is very commercialized and the main link between Downtown and Grosse Pointe Park. Grosse Pointe Park is higher class town directly east of the site. To the west of the site is a very industrialized working environment, that has vacant industrialized buildings as well as many of the areas jobs that still exist. The surrounding residential areas are suburbanized and use the site as a median between the daily uses and lifes of residents. Jefferson Ave is becoming scattered with vacant structures due to lack of residents on the site. Some of the structures varied in programs like music halls, office buildings or apartment buildings. These vacancies are leading to other structures to empty out, leaving them to just rot.

fig. 53: Left over structures

Jefferson-Chalmers Neighborhood fig. 54: Site

JEFFERSON-CHALMERS 83

ROADS WITH CURRENT RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL STRUCTURES

SIDE ROADS WITH NON VEGETATIVE SITES AND PARKING LOTS

Looking at the site and delaminating its layers I was able to find existing characteristics which contributed to design decisions relating to how the layers designed could splice and genetically interact with current elements and conditions. The first layers was finding existing circulation systems like the major roads and sidewalks. I was able to find dirt alleyways behind the zones that currently defined the site. The alleyways that seperate the commercial/retail zones from the residential zones would be the future area for the cultural corridor. The commercial zones were full of both used and vacated buildings, that had surrounding parking lots that seemed too large for what was needed. These lots could be the future parking for visitors and users of the designed cultural edge. Between each block or leftover residences is the residue of the alleys that were once used for utilities and garbage vehicles. These leftover linear spaces would become the new agricultural corridors that distribute down to the culture corridor and connect the new residences. The is chosen, since the existing alleyways lacked a natural regrowth so the destruction of vegetation would be minimal in those areas along with the cultural corridor area.

EXISTING SITE 85

CURRENT VEGETATION AND SIDEWALKS

EXISTING RESIDENCES WITH SIDEWALK EVAPORATION

The site has a good amount of vegatation currently taking over turning it into a very rural looking place, removing all evidence of humankind over time. Looking at what is currently leftover in terms of infrastructure, there is about less than a 1/3 of the original structures still built. Many of those structures that are still there are eroding and falling apart with boards all over the windows and tall vegetation growing around them. In areas with no structures the sidewalks have dissappeared and the roads are thinning out due to lack of traffic both pedestrian and vehicular. The growing trees are leaving their planted organized clusters found in more dense residential areas, and spreading out turning the entire blocks into forests and wooded hideouts. The designs attempted to salvage as much original vegetation both in the design of the new residences and the recreational corridor.

NUMBER OF RESIDENTS

Looking at the neighbor- JEFFERSON-CHALMERS NEIGHBORHOOD hood data of both JeffersonDISTRIBUTION OF RESIDENTSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; AGES Chalmers and Grosse Pointe Park, 300 I analyzed the age distribution of 250 the residents in each area. Looking 200 at the site you can see that there are more children than adults 150 within the neighborhood. While 100 looking at Grosse Pointe Park you can see that the number of adults 50 is more closely equal to the num0 ber of children within the area. 51 01 52 02 53 0 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 0 AGE MALE There are also more middle aged 18, 547 adults in this area than in Jefferson Chalmers, which has more young adult population. GROSSE POINTE PARK Since these communities are so close to each other, the projDISTRIBUTION OF RESIDENTSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; AGES 300 ect can try to integrate elements for both communities to come 250 together and interact socially 200 through a variation of systems and programs. 150

FEMALE

100 50 0 0

54 40 04 AGE

10,956

06 MALE

FEMALE

http://www.city-data.com/city/Detroit-Michigan.html

EXISTING SITE 87

CULTURE Nature

Craft Vendor Outdoor Cinema

Residences RESIDENCE

Wooded Area

Music Stage

Worker

Gallery

Open Field

Education

Apple orchard

Artist/Musician

Shade

Multi-Family

Nature Refuge

Single Family

Circulation Paved, Bicycle/Pedestrian Existing Road

URBAN FARM

Dirt Trail Parking

Crop Field

Sports

RECREATION

Garden Plot - allotment Greenhouse Storage

Tennis

Food Market

Basketball

Restaurant/Bar

Exercise Station Swimming Pool

PROGRAM 88

fig. 55: Philadelphia competition entry

The use of multiple programs allows for optimal use of the vacant space and utilizes a growth from an already existing multi-programmed edge. Multiple programs attract multiple types of people and uses, creating the ultimate organization of systems throughout the vacated space, potentially filling it up with urban environments and uses.

growth from retail edge

walking through

OFFICE/EDUCATION

GREENHOUSES

BACKYARDS

STORAGE

CULTURE

BACKYARDS

FILM/ GALLERIES/CLUBS

OUTDOOR FILM

BACKYARDS

RESIDENCES

FOOD MARKET

RESIDENCES

CAFE/ DISTRIBUTION

RESIDENCES

MUSIC VENUE

RESIDENCES

OFFICE/EDUCATION

RETAIL

MICHIGAN IS THE 2ND MOST AGRICULTURALLY DIVERSE STATE Michigan also ranks FIRST nationally for the production of PICKLEING CUCUMBERS, GERANIUMS, PETUNIAS, SQUASH and VEGETABLE-TYPE BEDDING PLANTS.

Michigan is SECOND nationally for BEANS, CARROTS, CELERY, PLUMS and THIRD in ASPARAGUS production.

Apples are Michigan’s largest and most valuable fruit crop.

ANNUAL CONSUMPTION PER PERSON 416 lbs of vegatables 294 lbs of fruit

AMOUNT OF LAND PER PERSON 1000 sq. ft.

ANNUAL CONSUMPTION PER FAMILY OF 4 1248 lbs of vegatables 882 lbs of fruit

10 FAMILIES

AMOUNT OF LAND PER FAMILY 4000-5000 sq. ft.

ANNUAL URBAN PRODUCTION 43, 560 sq. ft. = 1 acre

Data from U.S. Department of Agrictulture

fig. 56: Urban farming data

URBAN FARMING 90

Agriculture is common in rural areas since its something that takes up a vast amount of land. Since American cities are becoming more vacated, one of the design solutions that is tossed around is turning the vacant land into urban farms. One of the design ideas that is being tossed around it giving all the vacant land to large farming corporations. This still keeps residents seperated from work, home and play. The idea of agriculture is a good job creator and land that has been vacated for long periods allow for the use of crops on it. Michigan is a very agriculturally diverse state with the potential to create opportunities for locally grown crops in a neighborhood, to feed the residents or for the residents to sell themselves. There is a potential in a variety of uses with agriculture as a programmatic use. Crops can be distributed through social farmers markets and flower stands. They can support and supply local cafes and restaurants. The garden and plot can be an interesting social space, creating collective and shared experiences between residents. With the climate conditions of Michigan, the crops can be grown in elevated areas as well as in greenhouses fig. 57: Philadelphia design competition or sunrooms. Apple orchards and large crop fields can be used as large public spaces, creating recreational atmospheres for residents of all ages. Starting small giving crop growing space to multiple residents allows for self sustaining and cheaper methods of living for all kinds of residents. The amount of land needed to feed a family annually is far less than just turning an entire vacated site into farmland. The need for large farmland would just use a sites resources to supply the communities that have left to begin with, while taking away from the farms in existing rural areas. Where by creatnig smaller, resident run, or collectively controlled and shared plots, a neighborhood can grow around the farming while connecting at a local scale. (http://www.time.com/time/detroit)

fig. 58: Philadelphia design competition

URBAN FARMING 91

fig. 59: Bryant Park, NYC

fig. 60: Craft fair

CULTURAL 92

The city is full of culture. Cities like Toronto, Canada strive on things like their culture and large ethnic population. Almost half of Torontoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population came from outside the city, which bring culture, traditions and variety to the different neighborhoods. Some of its neighborhoods include two Chinatowns, Little Italy, Portugal Village, and Little India. This variation brings more the city in terms of spatial designs and overlapping of different uses and systems in order to give infrastructure needed for the population. (Osbaldeston 1) With many traditions and the introduction of much cultural music and art, Toronto hosts many festivals, cultural events and celebrations. Culture brings many events and things for people to do for entertainment on weekends and after work. The largest outdoor fair in Canada called the Canadian National Exhibition, is held in Toronto every year. Majority of its arts, music and museums are so significant and large that communities are created around one type or a blend of multiple types. (Osbaldeston 2)

Food and music both contribute culture from different countries to the city. In Toronto as well as other cities there are a variety of food festivals to correspond with the different countries that have groups of residents within the city. The festival, the shop, the restaurant, and the art gallery, these places are what bring people to the city who do not live there. These are the places that give the residents who live there something to do on their spare time or fulfill their hobbies. Cultural programs are random and urban within themselves, bringing in jobs, multiple types of people, and fulfil the pleasures of experiencing the urban atmosphere, in economical ways. (CASE 3)

CAFE

PERFORMANCE

SHOPPING

GALLERIES

POP-UP SHOP

fig. 61: Cultural programs

CULTURAL 93

fig. 62: Rendering of recreational strip

RECREATIONAL 94

Another major urbanistic planned activity is recreation. Recreation takes up space in the city and is one that is closely connected to landscape and nature. Recreational activities or public places that can cater to leisurely sporting activities are very attracting to the residents and visitors of the city. Parks and landscaping are tied to this ideal, due to these places having large open spaces for large social interaction and open ended activity. With a variety of recreational options, multiple users will interact and spaces can be used at different times of day and in different areas of the site. Having the infrastructure to cater to organized sports play or even open fields for random play, these places are still open ended in use. With hard material used on basketball and tennis courts, they can be used at night time for dancing, temporary fairgrounds, or even other black top games. With open fields, people can use them for picnics, reading, walking dogs, sun bathing or even just admiring nature. With having the infrastructure and material to create recreational spaces, the program and use options become endless. The location of recreational spaces are usually what determine what, and when they get used for. If a field is open and more connected to a natural wooded area it can be used during the day. Sporting courts and swimming pools can be used during the night with lighting and location to other zones within the area. Places like East Buffalo use parks and recreation as areas to connect to their schools, and cultural centers, which cater to a specific type of user (the students and younger residents). Other areas of Downtown and around waterfronts of Buffalo and even Detroit, these activity spaces cater to tourists, traveling workers, and residents of all ages to come use mainly during the day.

BASKETBALL

PLAYGROUND

TENNIS

COMMUNITY POOL

fig. 63: Recreational programs

RECREATIONAL 95

RESIDENTIAL BLOCKS

RECREATIONAL STRIPS

CULTURAL EDGE

PROJECT 96

LAMINATED 97

FIRST FLOOR fig. 64: Plan of typical block on the ground

CHECKERED 98

SECOND FLOOR fig. 65: Plan of typical block from above

CHECKERED 99

typical few blocks on site

spatial connections in the form

recreation path cutting housing

fig. 66: Project models of checkered housing

100

One of the major design solutions for regrowing a neighborhood on the site and connecting axially to existing houses and leftover alleys, was an idea of checkering (fig. 67). With this shifting the relationship between new and existing houses would be similar creating a rowed street face along the vehicular street. As one would walk along that street they would be pulled into the space between the houses through other structures set back into the alley of the block. These structures in the alley would be garden plots, greenhouses, storage sheds or residential apartments. As the person moves into the site towards the agricultural alleyway they are then given options to turn in other directions, interacting with private back yards, shared garden spaces and equipment running parallel with the streets. This thickening transforms the usual sidewalk and front yard atmosphere and pulls it into the site, allowing for more overlapping zones and more social interactions between neighbors and visitors.

fig. 67: Thickened block diagram

CHECKERED 101

CIRCULATION THROUGH SITE

CHECKERBOARD STRIPS

102

RESIDENTIAL CONNECTIONS

SHARED YARDS/ FARMING STRIP

CHECKERED 103

fig. 68: Recreational strip plan view

RECREATION STRIPS 104

STREET

The next system integration was adding recreational strips that run perpendicularly across the vehicular roads and farming distribution alleys (fig. 68). This direction of flow connects the blocks of housing that are separated by the vehicular roads as well as works as a circulation connector across the site for surrounding communities to the East and West. Since each block had collective shared side yards STRIP CREATED THROUGH A REFLECTION OF CHECKERING located by a shared greenhouse between two houses, the adjacent side yard would be a public park/playground space that the recreational path would link up with (fig. 69). These plots could have tennis courts, basketball courts, or public swimming pools within them, which varied depending on location and size. The recreational shared plots that slice across and in between dwellings would have an elevated pathway to connect each plot like a necklace (fig. 70). This elevated pathway, for walking, running or biking, allows residents to circulate over the streets away from cars and easily follow along the recreational zones which fig. 69: Recreational park zones within block are delineated by the path. The zones travel across the site linearly over roads, yet diagonally across the block alleyways.

fig. 70: Connection between recreational zones

RECREATION STRIPS 105

fig. 71: Aerial rendering of pathway

106

fig. 72: Tennis court within recreational pathway

RECREATION STRIPS 107

fig. 73: Walking down the cultural corridor

CULTURAL EDGE 108

With Jefferson Avenue directly south of the site and it being a very vehicular yet commercialized strip for the surrounding communities, I designed a cultural system to connect between the neighborhood and the Avenue. The edge I created to be all pedestrian flowing parallel with the recreational strip, allowing for the farming alleyways to distribute their goods down the cultural corridor. Between the corridor and the commercial Avenue would be parking lots for people to stop. The system created would be constructed permanent programmed cubes that would house the permanent programs like cafes and small shops (fig. 74). These cubes would be transparent visually attracting users, yet enclosed from weather. Surrounding the cubes would be 3’ high walled canopy systems that would extend each space 20’ in to directions with columns (fig. 75). These walls could be used for painted murals, and the canopies would house growth for temporary events like farmers markets, fairs and festivals.

PROGRAM STRUCTURE

fig. 74: Permanent cubes for shops/cafes

CANOPY

20’ 20’ fig. 75: Canopy/column system

CULTURAL EDGE 109

G PRO

TIA SPA 110

OU LAY

Between each block and the retail zones of Jefferson Avenue are open spaces of varying sizes, which allow for the cultural strip to become more dense or open along the its path. Since each program has its own canopy system, there can be a growth within each permanent program at any time. So if a cafe wanted to open up and set more tables outside it could extend to the columns of its own canopy. If a shop wanted to sell more goods, it could bring their products outside the permanent structures. This growth would happen in random places and each time a person travels down the cultural corridor they would have a different experience. The canopy and spatial layouts allow for random intersections of programs so produce could be sold next to a musical performance or people can eat and drink coffee with the books of the nearby bookstore. As each owner can grow out and interact with their neighbors the corridor becomes a medieval fair of markets and social interactions.

NIN AW

TEM S Y S

CULTURAL EDGE 111

112

The spatial layout (fig. 76) is designed to block two sides physically but not visually, and be open on two sides attracting people in. With the walls being short residents and visitors can visually see activities going on from all sides, pulling everyone into the corridor as well as outside it. People within are able to see the new neighborhood behind and visually connect to the area while shopping or relaxing. The spatial clearances are open enough for large crowds and product distribution with delivery trucks.

SPATIALGROWTH SPATIAL DESIGN

GROWTH STILL ALLOWS FOR VEHICLES TO TRAVEL THROUGH SPACE

fig. 76: Spatial system

CULTURAL EDGE 113

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The lived experiences and the possible performativity of life in cities and buildings calls forth the need to integrate the supple line into a Cartesian (binary) world.â&#x20AC;? - Neil Denari

fig. 77: View from vehicular street looking in

HOUSING TYPOLOGIES 114

fig. 78: Oblique views across neighborhood

As Denari says, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The osculatory aspect of lifes movements must be seen as multiple arcs and manifold curves in our psychological restructuring of the city.â&#x20AC;? The major structure that is replicated throughout the site is the residence to house a neighborhood of residents with varying socail make-ups. The major spatial design for the residences is curvature to create flowing movements as users travel between the housing. The curvature is also to allow for optimal views out on to the site into, yards, gardens, fields, and parks.

curve sets up oblique views out of the house fig. 79: Curvature for residential structures

HOUSING TYPOLOGIES 115

SECOND FLOOR

FIRST FLOOR

1SMALLSMALL APARTMENT AND SINGLE FAMILYFAMILY HOME HOME APARTMENT AND SINGLE

2SMALL APARTMENT SMALL APARTMENT AND SINGLE AND SINGLE FAMILY FAMILY HOME HOME

EXISTING VACANT STRUCTURE EXISTING VACANT STRUCTURE

LANDSCAPE INTERSTITIAL HOME LANDSCAPE INTERSTITIAL HOME

fig. 80: Housing types

116

fig. 81: Typical connection between houses

Creating four housing types (fig. 80), represent a spatial configuration to house different types of families, whether they have children, be elderly, or based on income level. All the residences materially share the same qualities, yet spatially work for multiple users. Ground floor layouts for elderly, or more space for large families, are just some spatial types. Materially each residence has a wall of glazing on the upper floor that houses the open plan, living and eating space with the dwelling. The other facades are clad in cement board which visually promotes horizontality as users walk along dwellings in the yards (fig. 81 & 82).

fig. 82: Material representation of houses

HOUSING TYPOLOGIES 117

Ownership is looked into througha splitting of shared yards and crops that are set up between residences.

fig. 83: Zone ownership

118

fig. 84: Typical connection between other houses

All residences own half a plot of garden and half a greenhouse. Each house has its own storage space and the side yards that is between the greenhouse and road is shared by the two houses that share the agricultural structures (fig. 83). Each residence has its own private backyard or balcony which is usually visually connected with other neighbors (fig. 85). The dwellings are orthogonal on the ground level for ease of foundation (existing dwellings as well). On the upper level the residences grow into the alleyways with home offices, apartments or sun rooms, further connecting the users with each other.

fig. 85: Material used within

HOUSING TYPOLOGIES 119

fig. 86: View down the residential alleyway

CONCLUSIONS 120

Since American urban environments are continuing to spiral downward into vacancy and disconnection, it give designers an opportunity to re-organize the city and neighborhood. Through the many factors that were looked into, the splicing and mixture of systems became a major solution to the problem. Being able to use the left over infrastructure and have circulation or space evolve from that allowed for familiarity and avoidance of mono-culture on multiple levels. By integrating systems that react to each other and their contexts, further meshes into an urban atmosphere of random uses. Yet the integration of multiple programs allowed for the creation of a neighborhood that sustained the needs of its residents removing the disconnected aspect that comes from using a car or suburb. The challenges and opportunities that come from using a specific vacant context is having unlimited space to design in, while dealing with randomized plots of leftover infrastructure to design with. The surrounding neighborhoods that are thriving on the edge of this vacancy give a potential to connect and design for an inflow of those residents. This allows for an overall urban community that removes separation between neighborhoods. Since the problem of vacancy is urban and current solutions are to sprawl away from it with separate zones for neighborhoods, the major solution was to use a multi-programed design. The basic idea of a city is multi-system and poly-cultural so to create a more sustainable community, the research led to looking at ways of integrating multiple users on the site. Things like the integration of checkering spaces between public and private uses, or creating linked spaces that circulate against the normal flow of vehicular traffic. These design solutions came from site specific research and analysis, while also looking at similarly designed solutions by other designers or multi-system objects in their own ecosystems. No matter what the site, the solution needs to have multiple systems at multiple scales in order to connect multiple users with overlapping zones and spaces, creating a self-sustaining urban atmosphere where it is needed most. By activating a variety of spaces, over time new and different users will come back from the surrounding doughnut of suburbia and a new neighborhood will form integrating work, living, and play. The methods used here as well as highlighted in other designerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, can be taken as a way to shrink the growth of the cities and their outskirts, since their populations are shrinking to begin with. This project is tied closely to practices for reinventing cities, yet represents an open-ended design method that links closely to context and user-type.

121

122

“Traditional urban design’s dependence upon a steady supply of substantial, sypathetically styled, and spatially sequenced architectural objects could not be sustained given the advent of mobile markets, automobile culture, and the decentralization of cultural norms.” - Charles Waldheim, Praxis 4

CONCLUSIONS 123

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 124

Ibelings, Hans, Anne Hoogewoning, Ingrid Oosterheerd, and Ton Verstegen. Artificial Landscape Contemporary Architecture, Urbanism. New York: NAI, 2000. Print. Kalcher, Sandra, and Thies Schroder. Landscape as a system : contemporary German landscape architecture. Boston: Heidelberg, 2009. Print. Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America’s Man-made Landscape. New York: Touchstone Book, 1994. Print. Landscape Architecture Site/Non-Site. Architectural Design. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Volume 77, Issue 2 < http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.libproxy.rpi.edu/ doi/10.1002/ad.v77:2/issuetoc > Laurie, Ian C., ed. Nature in Cities: The Natural Environment. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979. Print. Lee., Hall,. Olmsted’s America an “unpractical” man and his vision of civilization. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Print. Lynch, Kevin. Good City Form. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1984. Print. Marshall, Stephen. Cities, Design and Evolution. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Menin, Sarah. Nature and Space. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Melis, Liesbeth. Parasite Paradise: a Manifesto for Temporary Architecture and Flexible Urbanism. Rotterdam: NAi, 2003. Print. Mostafavi, Mohsen, and Gareth Doherty. Ecological Urbanism. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2010. Print. Moussavi, Farshid, and Daniel Lopez. The Function of Form. Barcelona: Actar, 2009. Print OMA. Parc de la Villette, France, Paris 1982. 2007. Office for Metropolitan Architecture. 26 Oct. 2009 <http://www.oma.eu/index.php?option=com_projects&view=pro ject&id=644&Itemid=10>. Organic approach to architecture. Chichester [England]: Wiley-Academy, John Wiley and Sons, 2003. Osbaldeston, Mark. Unbuilt Toronto a history of the city that might have been. Toronto: Dundurn, 2008. Print. Reeser, Amanda, and Ashley Schafer. Landscapes, Praxis: Journal of Writing Building. Vol. 1. Issue 4 New Orleans: Praxis, 2002. Print. 125

Richardson, Tim. Avant Gardeners. London: Thames & Hudson, 2008. Print. Rural and urban architecture between two cultures. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. Print. Schwartz, Martha. Vanguard landscapes and gardens of Martha Schwartz. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004. Print. Sorkin, Michael. Michael Sorkin Studio: Wiggle. Wien: Springer, 1998. Print. Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment. Architectural Design. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Volume 80, issue 3. 2010. web. < http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ ad.v80:3/issuetoc> Turner, Tom. City as Landscape A Post Post-modern View of Design and Planning. Dallas: Taylor & Francis, 1995. Print. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Transportable and Adaptable Architecture Research Unit: Publications.â&#x20AC;? The University of Liverpool. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. Urban space and cityscapes perspectives from modern and contemporary culture. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Waldheim, Charles. The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architec tural, 2006. Print. Waterhouse, Alan. Boundaries of the city the architecture of western urbanism. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1993. Print. William, Curtis,. Denys Lasdun architecture, city, landscape. London: Phaidon, 1994. Print.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 126

All photographs, drawings and diagrams are created by Joshua Boehlke unless otherwise noted.

fig. 1 : Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette: http://crisman.scripts.mit.edu/blog/?p=202 fig. 2: Vacant Philadelphia picture: http://www.gregorweekly.com/2009/12/05/gregor-weekly-macro-note-saturday28-november-2009-2/ fig. 3: Inner-city neighborhood: Google images fig. 4: Suburban philadelphia: (Joshua Boehlke Fall 2009 photograph) fig. 5: Rustbelt city map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Rust-belt-map.jpg Pages 10-11: photographs by Joshua Boehlke- July 2010 Page 12: Map: http://www.fiorebuildingworkshop.com/Texts/PRETTY%20VACANT%20(nicholasfiore.com).pdf Pages 14-15: Time Magazine photographs: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1864272_1810098,00. html fig. 6: Vacant industrial building: Daskalakis. Stalking Detroit. Barcelona: Actar, 2001. Print. fig. 7: Emscher Park: http://www.cudc.kent.edu/d-Service-Learning/Mahoning/Emscher.pdf fig. 8: Pop-up City: http://www.cudc.kent.edu/popup/ fig. 9: Pop-up City: http://www.cudc.kent.edu/popup/leap.html fig. 10: Pittsburgh student project: http://www.design.upenn.edu/files/Panorama09_09_PittsburghStudio.pdf fig. 11: Urban voids competition: http://www.vanalen.org/urbanvoids/ fig. 12: Pittsburgh studio project: http://www.design.upenn.edu/files/Panorama09_09_PittsburghStudio.pdf fig. 13: Stan Allen project: http://www.stanallenarchitect.com/ fig. 14: High line project designed by Diller and Scofidio Architects: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/06/anybody_skipping_work_to_see_t.html fig. 15: High line Image: http://ny.curbed.com/uploads/2008_12_highline.jpg fig. 16: Taichung Gateway Park: http://landscapeandurbanism.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html fig. 17: Taichung Gateway Park: http://www.architecturelist.com/2008/03/11/taichung-gateway-park-in-taiwan/ fig. 18: Southeast Coastal Park by FOA- Groundswell : constructing the contemporary landscape / Peter Reed. fig. 19: Parc de la Villette by Rem Koolhaas: http://parcdelavillette.wikispaces.com/file/view/Parc+de+la+Villette,+Rem+ Koolhaas.pdf fig. 20: Toronto Downsview park scan: CASE--Downsview Park Toronto. Munich: Prestel, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, 2001. Print. fig. 21: Projecting Detroit: Daskalakis. Stalking Detroit. Barcelona: Actar, 2001. Print. fig. 22: Michael Sorkin Shrooms prject: Sorkin, Michael. Michael Sorkin Studio: Wiggle. Wien: Springer, 1998. Print. fig. 23: Michael Sorking NYC project: Sorkin, Michael. Michael Sorkin Studio: Wiggle. Wien: Springer, 1998. Print. fig. 24: Michael Sorking NYC project: Sorkin, Michael. Michael Sorkin Studio: Wiggle. Wien: Springer, 1998. Print. fig. 25: Central Park image: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/wireless/free-wifi-in-nycs-central-park-now-thatsmore-like-it.asp fig. 26: Olmstead Emerald necklace plan: http://www.blogomite.com/2010/04/olmsteds-emerald-necklace.html fig. 27: Nolli Map: http://a1rchitecture.wordpress.com/ fig. 28: Peter Latz, landscape park: http://www.latzundpartner.de/projects/detail/17 fig. 29: Governors Island design: Inside/outside : between architecture and landscape / Anita Berrizbeitia and Linda Pollak. 1999. Book fig. 30: Igualada Cemetary project- Enric Miralles: Inside/outside : between architecture and landscape / Anita Berrizbeitia and Linda Pollak. 1999. Book fig. 31: Farming Detroit images: http://gas2.org/2010/01/22/detroit-from-motor-city-to-urban-farm/ fig. 32: unused infrastructure: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1349131 fig. 33: Urban farming: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/28/the-us-social-forum-in-detroit-appreciationand-questions/ fig. 34: Urban prarie: http://heartland.vanabbe.nl/?author=8&paged=2 fig. 35: High line before design image: http://artworksdesign.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/urban-green-space-retrofitsrail-line-parks/ fig. 36, 37, & 38: Waiting spaces image: Cities of Dispersal. Architectural Design. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Volume 78, issue 1. 2008. web. < http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ad.v78:1/issuetoc> fig. 39: Collective spaces image: http://www.abitare.it/highlights/alice-in-wonderwall-%E2%80%93-32-dwellings/ fig. 40 & 41: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Transportable and Adaptable Architecture Research Unit: Publications.â&#x20AC;? The University of Liverpool. Web. 29 Aug. 2010. fig. 42: http://www.tuvie.com/aeroform-subsidized-urban-living-module/ fig. 43, 44 & 45: Melis, Liesbeth. Parasite Paradise: a Manifesto for Temporary Architecture and Flexible Urbanism. Rotterdam: NAi, 2003. Print.

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fig. 46: Phragmites: http://www.reedbed.com/2ePhragmites.html fig. 47: Reed bed image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reedbeach_edit1.JPG fig.48: Reed bed in London: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Milton_Ley fig. 49: Jefferson Ave, Detroit, MI: Google streetview image fig. 50: Site map: Google maps for Detroit, MI fig. 51: Site map: Google maps for Detroit, MI fig. 52 & 53: Site images: Google streetview image fig. 54: Site map: Google maps for Detroit, MI fig. 55: Urban void competition entry: http://www.vanalen.org/urbanvoids/ fig. 57 & 58: Urban voids competition images: http://www.vanalen.org/urbanvoids/ fig. 59: Bryant park, NYC photograph: Daniel Cotrupe- Fall 2009 fig. 60: Craft fair image: Joshua Boehlke August 2009 fig. 61: Cultural programs- Google images fig. 62: Rendering- Joshua Boehlke fig. 63: Recreational programs- Google images fig. 64 & 65: Floor plans- Drawn by Joshua Boehlke fig. 66: Model photographs- Joshua Boehlke fig. 71, 72, 73, 77, & 86: Renderings- Joshua Boehlke

FIGURES & NOTES 128